BY JOSEPH AISENBERG
Editor’s Note: Joseph Aisenberg, the noted author of Brian de Palma’s Carrie: Studies In the Horror Film, has some thoughts of cinema and why we love movies, as seen through the film criticism of Susan Sontag.
ORLANDO — Whenever I pick up a juicy volume of literary essays, I think of the great movie critic Pauline Kael. Once asked in an interview why she didn’t write something explaining exactly what she meant by the word “art,” she replied, tartly, the whole of her criticism made up the explanation.
This remark struck me then and now as a hopeful way of not having to say any more than she could on the subject, combined with an attempt to coerce readers to plow through a lot more of her work. Susan Sontag’s last collection of essays, Where The Stress Falls, published just two years before her death, has me wondering the notion all over again, more than twenty years after her disappearance from the cultural scene.
Does this kind of thing — the assemblage of an author’s short, basically independent bits between cloth-bound covers — have any overriding, emergent idea, or is it just a loose, convenient collection of stray thoughts? The odd attempt to translate to the relative immortality of the bookshelf prose lived out with sinful brevity between the slick pages of magazines and in newsprint? Perhaps when brought together, like the representatives of an abstract country, these dangling strands (or loose canons) may reveal a special formal law whose vital essence flows through the entirety of the text, underscoring a temporal and geographical family resemblance which, once discerned, may illuminate the soul of an artist and his times, to turn a trite phrase.
Sontag’s Criticism: Let’s Dive In!
A notion more or less appropriate for a thoughtful consideration of Sontag if one recalls what she wrote in the preface to her first volume of criticism, Against Interpretation and Other Essays: “…what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibility.”
Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that the true purpose of autobiography was the teasing out of insidious, persistent designs in one’s past. That is, the discovery of the style of one’s own Life. More humbly, as an essayist, I can only try to connect a few of the dots.
Right off you see Susan Sontag was at odds with herself. The sleek, contoured aplomb inherent in her playful, trochaic name couldn’t be more unlike the bulky syntactical battering she regularly gave her readers. Somehow one expected to find between the covers of her slim books evidence of a witty, inveterate punster, an elegant cross-legged dandy of the mind whom high toned willowy words like “lambent,” “lucid” or “limpid” could be applied. Instead we were made to swallow very grim prose indeed, the product of a mind enduring one night after another of metaphorical bathless depression, sucking down coffee and cigarettes; swiping her brow with a heavy hand as she hunched over her notebooks, to carefully put an “ass” into aesthete — never more so than when extolling the “transparent” “luminous” virtues of genuine art.
Over a long career as an intellectual, Susan Sontag amassed an oeuvre vacillating between the great beauties of art together with a didactic, iron-like striving toward the “right.”
These twin urges were evoked by her as great opposing forces. On close examination, however, they were the intermingling mists of a rather single minded soul. The effect seems to have been achieved by cross pollinating modern French aesthetics — a nihilistic, idea-hardened variation on the theme of “art for art’s sake” — with something of the so called Frankfurt Marxist School’s critically theorizing mass culture to death, to unmask false consciousness. As a kid I had admired one of her books (Aids and Its Metaphors), though further reading eventually produced in me a violent attack of indigestion, caused by almost all the elements of her “style”: her thick, high-minded approach to everything (including Camp) which paradoxically gave her work its pale wan texture; the pretentious name dropping done to drum into our heads the sheer volume, weight, and authority of her reading; a congenital inability to cite anything; her wordy way of stating the obvious as if it were a profound revelation; and her austere reverence for high culture fads such as the now very old fashioned Nouveau Roman, an urge more Verdurin than monkish. Sontag, despite her image of cosmopolitan sophistication, was the perennial wet blanket, an invariable stick in the mud whose literary skies were perpetually overcast even when her subjects were comedians, since clowns are really the saddest people in the world.
Because her famous essay “Against Interpretation” understandably colored the way I thought of her work I had glided over her intense liberal politics and got away with the false impression her last collection represented the chronicle of a frivolous intellectual’s painful metamorphosis from brittle, worldly aesthete to soulful moralist — brought about by a harrowing confrontation with the death and devastation of Bosnia in the early and mid nineties (as if she were one of Joan Didion’s sad princesses adrift in blood-dark history, which in a sense she always was).
Upon re-reading a lot of her work, however, I discovered the whole syndrome of her thinking in plain view almost 60 years ago. She describes herself in an essay called “Thirty Years Later” (Stress), in a consideration of her first nonfiction, as having always been a “pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist”. Here the stress falls and one can’t help feeling a nagging sense something or other has been carelessly smoothed out with terms and descriptions whose vague transitional utility have no style whatsoever.
The book before us, attractively turned out, is split into three sections, reminiscent of a three act problem play by Ibsen. Or maybe we should think of it as representing the dialectic of intellectual conscience? Entitled “Reading, “Seeing,” “There and Here,” the “Reading” section is best. One might have expected her to be at the top of her game in the “Seeing” department, since her greatest talent was movie criticism, probably because there were fewer pretentious schools of thought for her to ape. Her marvelous essay on Bergman’s masterpiece Persona, along with her work on Godard (in Styles of Radical Will) should still be considered touchstones for any admirer of such shadow show pleasures. Where literature was concerned, however, she was often so awestruck by the grand tradition of refined, solemnly modish seriousness she at times became little more than an adventurous ambassador of bores, degenerating into an expert blurbalizer on the backs of a lot of pretty dull books.
She called such windy stuff as A Book of Memories by Peter Nadas one of the greatest novels of the latter part of the twentieth century; extolled the “vituperative” virtues of Genet. She reads like a didactic priestess of cultured essences existing against a horde of entertainment industry “barbarians,” a word she used with complete unselfconsciousness, as if such airs were a sign of genuine discernment. Nowadays taking pot shots at success has come to seem almost neurotic and may be what most makes her a relic. Suffused as we are in a market-driven relativism even such old capitalist concepts as “values” have become meaningless in the face of fame and big box office.
The main good thing about this batch of lit crit is the unfamiliar (to me) names discussed. A whole slew of strange exotic scribblers: Machado De Assis, Danilo Kis, Witold Gombrowicz and many, many more. Several immediately found their way onto my list for future reading. Secondly, Sontag seems, perhaps illusorily, clearer about what she’s saying than in the past. Nowhere is there any of the gaping emptiness or affected sophistication of, say, her lengthy pointless study of “the pornographic imagination” (Radical Will), though we do get something like it in miniature when she opines about Wagnerian opera (“Wagner’s Fluids” in “Seeing”, pt. 2, Stress), a piece beginning like one of those sly performances by Jaques Derrida, whose repetitious ideas and slithery contextual slips seem to reveal a whole weird cosmos of interpenetrative meanings. With Ms. Sontag’s MS, however, such verbal doings attenuate to a slight rippling gush of enthusiastic “music appreciation”. Another plus: we don’t have to put on hiking boots to go brambling through the usual overgrown thicket of numbing deadwood so often found in her work, furrowing one’s eyebrows, though they may still twitch with irritation from phrase to phrase.
Now and then, here and there, the way she sums up a writer even has a little kick to it: “Machado De Assis’s novel [The Posthumous Memoir of Bras Cubas] belongs in that tradition of narrative buffoonery, the talkative first person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers…” — though about this device she makes an untenable generalization along gender lines: a female narrator of this sort, she says, is impossible without cutting off “reader identification” because women are conditioned to be nurturing and outwardly directed. Spoken like a Hollywood producer.
About another writer, a Mr. Zagajewski, she states, “…Then and now, here and there — [his] whole book oscillates, vibrates with contrasts … Everything reeks of dissimilarity, savor, message, metaphor.”
In his “…rendering, nature turns out to be wittily steeped in the bathos of national histories…” she dubs him a “…expert lover of cities.” Wonderful flashes. But they die in pasty judgments like this: “FERDYDURKE is one of the most bracing, direct books ever written about sexual desire — this without a single scene of sexual union. To be sure, the cards are stacked from the start in the favor of Eros. Who would not concur in the silencing of this social babble by the clamor of rumps, thighs, calves? The head commands, or wishes to. The buttocks reign.” Aside from the fact a good lubrication might cut down the noise problem, this ugly contraption of an observation fails just where it’s supposed to fly. Susan Sontag’s sass always fizzles.
Of course she’s still addicted to the overarching statement as well as the chance to drop as many recondite names as possible, but she makes an attempt to examine the “how” of the works under discussion and not just their importance as cultural artifacts — an odd thing to say of an avowed aesthete who once claimed to find no interest at all in performing social diagnostics criticism, but true.
Many of the works analyzed in the first section of Stress are comic novels, though there’s plenty of serious stuff in case you were worried — possibly as a response to her notorious lack of humor. As per her political concerns over her last decade, a few of the authors come from eastern European countries; possibly because conscience and consciousness constitute the book’s deep down themes, a great number of the works she describes are first person narrative.
What Makes Great Art Great?
Blurry in the beginning, but clearing like a blue spring morning, one comes to realize each essay seems to be asystematically flogging a point, which turns out to be a phantasm of her earlier notions of art (discussed below), a socio-literary theme taking its curious shape right before our eyes, to use another tiresome expression. As I understood it, her thesis throughout seems to be that the horror and absurdity of history have, by the authors of the novels she analyzes, been fused with the techniques and structures of their works qua works; they radiate a distinct moral meaning not simply in the merely positive form of their plots and themes, but at the basic micro units of their stylistic structures, i.e. their structures are their morals.
Aside from whether or not such a claim can be demonstrated in any meaningful sense (for a fascinating try see Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) certain problematic implications immediately prompt her to make a direct and appalling claim. In her piece on Danilo Kis she says that, while the tragedy of deadly and despotic regimes does not ipso facto make “… a great writer … geography is destiny.”
The mean meaning behind this is a little warped, but the point is plain: a writer cannot be Great without crimsoned history’s gravity giving him something grave to express, which is one of her stalest ideas yet, though it does explain the highly enthused frenzy with which she eventually set about putting on a bleak, straight faced production of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo.
The central essay in this “Reading” portion, as I see it, is one about Roland Barthes. It concerns not fiction but a state of mind, the capital of which turns out to be Paradox. Running all her mannered manners together a phrase or two does plop with genuine rainy poetry, but more often the result is silly. About Barthes’ textual persona she writes: “His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes’ less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings—most of them from the 1960’s—are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight ahead energy his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic … Barthes strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure: a method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas — their design, their shape.”
This is what she hopes her own work will achieve — summative formulations and all — while putting in a plug for the idea that Barthes’ temperament somehow preceded the fashionability of his style, one presumes, as a kind of lawful alibi in advance against criticisms of her own faddish borrowing. Yet despite the alliteration, the snaky S’s and dainty I E’s coming after that colon, the loss of tension due to a certain awkwardness of rhythm, as well as the recession of precise meaning down a corridor lined with mirrors, never quite gets made up for, the result of a goofy kind of bookish high romanticism.
By the way, my dictionary offers this rather simple definition of aphorism: “Short pithy sentence … A concise statement or principle … often ingenious formulation of a truth or sentiment usu. in a single sentence.” In other words, not what she wrote.
Sontag tells us Barthes was able to “conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded against the other to yield an unexpected relation.” She goes on to give us an example so simple it must be for beginners, and not especially vivacious: “The point of Voltairean travel [she tells us Barthes writes] is to ‘manifest immobility’.”
According to her Barthes “as a writer preferred short forms … he was particularly drawn to miniature ones, like the haiku or the quotation.” As indeed was another figure, Walter Benjamin whom Ms. Sontag has been influenced by. Her admiration for the petite, the miniature, the quotation, and that haiku comparison, crop up again and again throughout her work clothed with a certain ideological naiveté shocking in a renowned thinker. One recalls the pure aesthetic delight she took in the tiny delicate beauty of the North Vietnamese as described in a strange, political travel piece she wrote protesting the Vietnam war called “Trip to Hanoi” (in Styles of Radical Will) wherein she suggests, among other things, that their pleasing pint sized appearance signified an inner serenity and austerity.
This essay has to be read to be believed, showing off to a terrible extreme what Gore Vidal once called her awesome will to understand the work of other cultures, “Ms. Sontag’s New Novel” (United States). It can be read as a modern “Notes From The Underground” in a feminine key. The diary of a person violently trying to assimilate a whole country’s problems to the geographical coordinates of her mind. But (returning to Barthes) she writes “…[his] books…tend to be multiples of short forms rather than ‘real’ books, itineraries of topics rather than unified arguments”—quietly speaking for herself again; reflecting the book in hand.
Is Art For Art’s Sake Another Form Of Polemics?
Eventually she resorts to a critic’s cheapest trick. She erects a sudden oppositional comparison between Barthes and Sartre. “Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization… [he was] the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine.” Had only Ms. Sontag evaded such a polarity between two helpless thinkers she would not have, so to speak, deconstructed mid sentence.
It is interesting (actually it’s not) the way she offers up this synthetic, purely functional negative philosophical background (Sartre’s simplified self) so she can highlight her subject (Barthes’ and his elusive plurality, his non-confrontationalism) without actually having to dot the I of any real insight; her preference for Barthes here also jangles against her call (or badgering) elsewhere for a quasi-intellectual activism.
Note too the numerous unexplained references to the M word, morality, wafting like a gray mist around her descriptions of the way the political tragedies so many of her subjects have had to contend with managed to seep into their works at what she leaves us to feel is an indefinable X level of their writing. In any case Sartre continues quite awhile as Barthes’ sad foil, holding a completely opposite set of literary values and ethics which, I think, tell us more about Ms. Sontag’s own gnarled worldview than either of the two critics, revealing an antagonism between elements of Sontag’s thinking she would no doubt deny, though she’s already owned up to part of them.
The key: intellectual material in Sontag’s hands always turns out to be the cracked mirror of a compact.
The problem stems from her being a fake aesthete. Susan Sontag — for reasons of ambition and what I suppose she takes to be a smart style — has allowed herself to pretend to juggle what she thinks of, but never quite acknowledges she thinks of, as diametrically opposed notions (analogous to those thugs who believe Life and Art separate but equal essences in some cosmic whiz-kid’s palms), ideas she hinted at when she referred to her “pugnacious aestheticism” and her “barely closeted” morality. What I mean is, unconsciously, she has tried to set up her would-be concern for the beauty of artistic form as a first principal which somehow magically ushers humanist ethics back into the equation either by unlawful rear entry or osmosis, making itself felt immanently in the style of literary works (even Where the Stress Falls follows this general drift, beginning with literary concerns fortified by politics then swallowing them whole in ideology and polemics).
Her argument in the past (“On Style”, Against Interpretation) began as if it were going to maintain the sophisticated argument form and content are essentially the same thing. She brought it up, toyed with it, but eventually left the split intact as she went on to define the function of form as a type of mind expansion or consciousness raising, hence her support of the new in art.
The by-product of this titillated awareness was supposed to be, if I got the work’s general groovy trend, a new prismatic kind of understanding. Having become the foundation of an evolved intellect this expanded awareness was supposed to allow the self to act out in true moral conscience. What is quite obvious in these concoctions — the closeted moral, the ethical by-product—is the absolute preeminence of the sermon and ideology for Sontag all along — whether behind, above, below, or distributed via some ingenious code throughout works.
The sermon was always the justification for the sensual experience of art, recalling once more the German critical Theorist Theodor Adorno who maintained with a dubious kind of either or logic that we should invert what he saw as the received order of things: we should indulge hedonism in life and erect a rigorous asceticism in art (Aesthetic Theory). It is no accident the essay “Against Interpretation” starts by telling us the origin of art was religious ritual and magic since for her art was always church, but church without Christ, church emptied of anything but pure churchiness, as if the heady atmosphere of a Proustian cathedral must by its very grandness imbue the bewitched spectator with specialness, even if the spectator doesn’t actually believe anything — like the modern Sunday Christer who, sensing the inertia of the institution’s long history, takes the history itself as a stamp of genuine godliness.
What Even Is The Place of Pleasure In Art?
This leads me to something which may seem beside the point but I think needs underscoring, since Sontag makes an offhand assertion about Barthes work. Much of it, she says, was devoted to “pleasure.” What place does pleasure have in Sontag’s aesthetics? Pleasure for what? And in what sense?
We never really understand the meaning of this word in her work, which floats about with the same ethereal subliminality as “moral.” She disqualifies most leisure activities as soulless commercial consumption, yet considering her application of the term to architecture, garden grottoes, painting, one has the sneaking sense she’s really just referring to a classier, more educated version of the usual sort of “good life”, what we see so many Woody Allen characters living on the screen. There’s nothing wrong with it, but why doesn’t she own up to the material foundation of such interests instead of trying to ascribe to them spiritualized non-attributes?
It’s a process not unlike that of Henry James’s late works wherein he attempted to efface the concrete milieu of wealth his fancy, novelettish plots rested on, spreading out a vague, amorphous smoke screen of tedious prose as if the direct link between material value and the Transcendence could be denied simply by grinding it away, insinuating some thingymabob in one paragraph only to take it back in the next (presumably what is meant by those who talk of James the subtle “psychologist”). From an amateur’s armchair I’d say it seemed like they both had something to hide, and for a few of the same reasons. Thankfully, Miss Sontag never shows the sort of direct disgust and horror for the facts of animal existence that makes James’s work maddening at times, though I think it’s a difference of degree. The disgust is there if you look.
Finally, she winds up with a questionable, passionate paean to Barthes: “And from this vantage point his work now appears to unfold with more grace and poignancy and with far greater intellectual power than that of any of his contemporaries, the considerable truths vouchsafed to the aesthetes’ sensibility, to a commitment to intellectual adventure, to the talent for contradiction and inversion—those “late” ways of experiencing, evaluating, reading the world; and surviving in it, drawing energy, finding consolation (but finally not), taking pleasure, expressing love.” This would seem to be Sontag’s recipe for living in a lost world, and dying in it too, a clue to the genuine part of her ambitions (especially that parenthetical note of fatality).
Still, it’s a question of taste. I never much cared for the one book of Barthes’ essays I read, or the tedious introductory things he pasted into one of Robbe-grillet’s old new novels—fact I preferred many of the very contemporaries S.S. dispenses with: Derrida, Kristeva (despite all her Freud), even poor old faulty Foucault. And in the end how difficult is it, really, to cultivate a talent for contradiction? My boss must be a genius then.
Editor’s Note: End of part 1. Part 2 of Aisenberg’s essay on Susan Sontag will be published soon.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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